Ours is not the only culture to have combined words and pictures to tell stories with drama and depth. This story is my take on the comics potential of Aztec (or Mexica) and Mayan cosmology and culture. Imagine a world with powerful empires, huge cities built on trade, and three thousand years of remembered history, but where even the wheel doesn’t exist. A world where heroes step in and out of legend and magicians transform themselves at will. Mol Kupul lives in this world. He is a man plagued with visions of his own destruction, torn between death and life.

In approximately one month, Lords of Death and Life will be re-printed in a new, expanded version with the help of the Xeric Foundation! This is going to be the new cover. I’m pretty excited. Keep an eye out because I’m going to have to get off my butt and open up an online store for this thing when I finally get it.

Actually, the wheel did exist in Mesoamerica– it was just used differently. The difference between people in the Americas and those of the so-called “old world,” was that those in the latter had beasts of burden; that is, animals that could be domesticated. Domesticated animals were able to bear load, and thus the wheel aided in increasing the load an animal could carry.

The only animals that lent themselves to domestication in the Americas were llamas.

I know. I’m going to attribute that line to “poetic license.” Archaeologists have famously (and more than once) found ancient Mesoamerican toys with wheels on them. The fact that no one ever adapted this technology for use on a human scale must, necessarily, be attributed to environmental conditions. There were few domesticated animals in the Americas, llamas, from what I’ve read, will absolutely refuse to pull any load dragging behind them such as a wagon, and even wheelbarrows or some sort of dogsled with wheels would be impractical when most of the heavily civilized parts of the Americas were too hilly, too mountainous, or too densely forested to make wide flat roads stretch any great distance. It was just easier to hire some guy to carry your stuff for you on his back.

The wheel “didn’t exist” in any context modern people would think to use it for. The footnote to that claim (that it did exist in certain specific instances) would just clutter up a pretty paragraph.

[…] and it's better than the other D&D campaign comics I've seen parodying other famous stories; Lords of Death and Life, which is set in the Mayan civilisation; Girl Genius, which is a steampunk adventure involving […]